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Ira Shor1
Alexandre Saul2
Ana Maria Saul2
RESUMO
Ira Shor é professor da City University of New York’s Graduate Center
(Phd Program in English) e no Departamento de Inglês do College of Staten
Island (CSI). O Dr. Shor tem se dedicado ao ensino de alunos da graduação e
pós-graduação, na perspectiva da educação crítica. O trabalho de Shor com
Freire teve início em 1980 e se estendeu até 1997. Ambos são coautores do
primeiro livro falado de Paulo Freire intitulado, no Brasil, Medo e ousadia:
o cotidiano do professor. Nesta entrevista, concedida aos professores Ale-
xandre Saul e Ana Maria Saul, o professor Shor discute a importância da
pedagogia crítica na formação de professores, diante de um cenário global
de crescente conservadorismo e adoção de políticas públicas de educação
neotecnicistas, que contribuem para obstaculizar a autonomia das escolas
e dos professores. Ele diz da atualidade do pensamento de Paulo Freire
como uma possibilidade factível de construção de uma educação pública
e democrática no bojo da qual a formação de professores precisa se fazer
DOI: 10.1590/0104-4060.46863
1 Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês da City University of New York. 2800 Victory
Blvd, Staten Island, NY 10314. E-mail: professorishor@gmail.com
2 Entrevistadores: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Programa de Estudos
Pós-Graduados em Educação. São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil. Rua Ministro Godói, nº 969 – 4º andar,
sala 4E-15. CEP: 05.015-000. E-mails: anasaul@uol.com.br e asaul@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
Ira Shor is a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center
(Programa Phd em Inglês) and at the English Department at the College of
Staten Island (CSI). Dr. Shor has been dedicated to teaching undergraduate
students and graduate students from the perspective of critical education.
The work of Shor with Freire began in 1980 and lasted until 1997. Both are
co-authors of the first talking book by Paulo Freire, called in Brazil Fear and
boldness: the teacher’s daily life. In this interview, with Professors Alexandre
Saul and Ana Maria Saul, Professor Shor discusses the importance of critical
pedagogy on teacher education, in the face of a global setting of increasing
conservatism and adoption of educational public policies of a neo-technicist
character, which contribute to hinder the autonomy of schools and teachers.
He highlights the pertinence and timeliness of the thought of Paulo Freire
as a feasible possibility of building public and democratic education in the
midst of which teacher education has to be done with dialogue, respect for
different types of knowledge and ways of knowing, horizontality in human
relations and inseparability between theory and practice. Ira Shor points out
that, for Paulo Freire, the construction of a more equal world for all, would
need a kind of utopia that has well planted roots in history. He emphasizes
the impossibility of education neutrality and the need of awareness to
transform reality.
Keywords: Paulo Freire; critical pedagogy; teacher education; public edu-
cation.
Apresentação
Ao mesmo tempo, é fundamental estimular ações que vão para além dos
espaços locais de formação de educadores e permitam o esforço contra-hege-
mônico. Isso significa fortalecer a luta coletiva dos educadores por melhores
condições de trabalho e por propostas de educação que promovam a liberdade
e o debate público sobre a sociedade que se quer construir, forjar alianças entre
grupos de professores/pesquisadores que estão investigando e desenvolvendo
práticas transformadoras de formação docente e entre esses grupos e movimentos
sociais que reivindicam a implementação e ampliação de seus direitos. Por fim,
mas com igual importância, não se pode prescindir da conquista de espaço na
grande mídia, buscando dar visibilidade às conquistas e demandas dos educa-
dores das escolas e universidades.
É preciso, contudo, recusar o otimismo ingênuo de que a formação de
educadores é a alavanca para a transformação da escola, da educação e da so-
ciedade, assim como o pessimismo mecanicista de que só se pode fazer alguma
coisa depois de mudanças infraestruturais. Isso significa nem superestimar e nem
subestimar a formação docente, assumindo-a como essencial ao desenvolvimento
profissional dos educadores e à reflexão crítica sobre a opção de educação que
sempre precisa ser feita e que informa e orienta a prática.
Conquistar e desenvolver novos modelos contra-hegemônicos de formação
de educadores é um grande desafio que se coloca para os pesquisadores desse
campo de estudo. Claro que isso não se faz de um dia para outro, pois exige
grande esforço político, teórico e metodológico. No entanto, com inspiração
em Paulo Freire, é preciso buscar fazer, dentro de limites históricos, o que é
possível ser feito hoje, para tornar o que ainda não pode ser feito mais possível.
Os temas aqui anunciados orientaram as questões da entrevista com o pro-
fessor Dr. Ira Shor, da City University of NY’s Graduate Center (Phd Program
in English), e do Departamento de Inglês do College of Staten Island (CSI).
Ira Shor tem se dedicado ao ensino de alunos da graduação e pós-graduação,
na perspectiva da educação crítica. É autor de 9 livros, dentre os quais, três
focalizam o pensamento e a prática de Paulo Freire. O trabalho de Shor com
Freire teve início em 1980 e se estendeu até o falecimento de Freire, em 1997.
Shor e Freire são coautores do primeiro livro falado de Paulo Freire intitulado,
no Brasil, Medo e ousadia: o cotidiano do professor. Nessa produção, os autores
discutem, com destaque, a questão do conhecimento, do diálogo e dos funda-
mentos da educação libertadora, em imbricação com a formação dos profes-
sores, e a importância da inserção político-pedagógica dos educadores dentro e
fora da escola. O livro de Shor, Critical teaching and everyday life, ainda sem
tradução brasileira, foi a primeira obra integralmente destinada ao tratamento
da pedagogia crítica de Freire no contexto norte-americano.
*
* *
Interviewers: In the dialogical book that you wrote with Paulo Freire, A
pedagogy for liberation, published in 1987, there is a very exciting chapter titled
“How can teachers become liberating educators?”. Almost thirty years after the
publication of this book, in a given context of a “controlling” and “evaluative”
State, defined by neoliberal ideology, which aspects of your proposals you
would keep in relation to this theme and what would you add in this direction?
Ira Shor: In that chapter, Paulo Freire and I speak about our own formation
as teachers. This is a good starting point I still recommend for all educators re-
thinking their teaching practice. We can learn how we learned to teach like we do.
Composing professional autobiographies makes explicit our own development.
Before becoming teachers, we are exposed to many years of traditional pedagogy
in schools and colleges where “the banking model” of instruction dominates,
where the traditional subject matters have authority. Few of us ever take part
in participatory, dialogic, problem-posing, critical classrooms. This means
that we start our own teaching careers always already formed by traditional
instruction – teachers lecture and students do seatwork, memorize materials,
respond to questions, and take tests. This is the standard model of schooling we
internalize year by year as students and then repeat when we become teachers.
Traditional schooling does not invite us to practice democratic relations
or to develop critical consciousness, to question the validity of the official story
presented in textbooks or to challenge unequal power relations in the status
quo. Our writing and reading in school involves required texts and essays, and
a lot of memorizing.
We become critical educators when we reflect on how traditional teaching
and learning gradually occupied us in the years of our own schooling. Paulo
Freire was very committed to teachers taking responsibility for their own for-
mation and re-formation into the critical, student-centered educators required
to build democracy in society. We cannot expect the traditional status quo to
train us in how to question the status quo, so we educators will have to build
this training despite opposition from the top down.
In our talking book from 1986, I also proposed listening carefully to
students as they speak to learn how they understand the specific subject matter
under study as well as how they perceive themselves in their world. Teaching
practice should be shaped by student expression and student learning. We con-
struct lesson plans and syllabi from the discourse and thinking students display
in class, fashioning sequentially more demanding tasks based in the activities
we observe.
Paulo Freire maintained that teachers must learn to respect and value the
everyday idioms students bring in class, while also teaching standard usage as
a tool for opposition in society against inequality, that is, teaching high-status
discourse so that non-elite students gain the disposition and the linguistic tools
needed to fight for social justice in their unequal society.
Teacher-talk is an authoritative, academic idiom spoke in standard usage
to announce their position as the director of the classroom. This teacherly voice
is generally distinct in loudness, explicitness, lexicon, syntax, accent, emphasis,
and intonation from the vast majority of students. (In one of my classes, a student
wrote this when I asked them to write “advice to the teacher”: “Don’t kill us
with your voice.”) The institutional voice of the teacher may be one instrument
imposing what Paulo called “the culture of silence” on students because by
merely speaking in their community idioms students announce or display their
lower-class identities.
The conflict of idioms is part of the division Paulo saw between the
teacher and the students, which he posed as the first problem in building a lib-
erating classroom, which he understood as a mutual learning process. This is
why I named one discourse goal of the critical classroom as “the third idiom.”
By this, I mean that non-elite students (the majority) come to class speaking
non-authoritative community discourses while the teacher arrives trained in
authoritative academic discourses. How do we overcome this linguistic divide? I
have proposed that teachers can develop hybrid speech styles which incorporate
colloquial/conversational features while conveying formal subject matters and
analytic frameworks. This third idiom modeled by the teacher should be offered
in ways that invite students to practice similar rhetorical moves. This rhetorical
process serves democratization which pulls both teachers and students forward
into the gradual invention of a converging discourse.
Paulo Freire said in our book about learning from students, “They taught
me without saying that I should never dichotomize these two sets of knowledge,
the less rigorous one from the more rigorous one. They taught me without saying
that their language was not inferior to mine. Their syntax was as beautiful as
mine.”(p. 29). Further, he proposed that “Liberatory education is fundamentally
a situation where the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both
have to be cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. This is for me the first
test of liberating education, for teachers and students both to be critical agents
in the act of knowing.”(p. 33). Paulo’s critical classroom repositions the human
subjects involved in it.
In the chapter you refer to, on becoming a critical educator, Paulo also em-
phasized the larger social context in which any subject matter or generative theme
was situated: “The criticism that liberating education has to offer emphatically
is not the criticism which ends at the subsystem of education. On the contrary,
the criticism in the liberatory class goes beyond the subsystem of education and
becomes a criticism of society.” (p. 35). Paulo saw teacher-training for critical
practice involving a study of power in society, particularly the capitalist power
to regulate mass education, by enforcing required textbooks and testing regimes.
He called this centrally-controlled curriculum a “limit situation” to liberating
education against which we invent “limit-acts.” The dominant or traditional
curriculum masks the class-based power relations which they serve, so the task
of the critical teacher is to find ways to effectively reveal what is hidden. The
educator who is becoming a critical teacher recognizes, then, that education is
unavoidably, a form of politics, that is, a site of power relations involving how
should schooling shape students into becoming people who shape their world.
Paulo also urged in that chapter “[…] that not all kinds of lecturing is
banking education” (p. 40) an important qualification to his banking metaphor
(whereby teachers bank deposits of pre-formulated official knowledge into the
passive minds of students). Paulo suggested what I later called “the dialogic
lecture,” where an extended formal presentation by the teacher verbally poses
questions and materials which “illuminate reality” (Paulo’s phrase). The ani-
mated presentations of the critical teacher can “critically re-orient students to
society.” (p. 40). Paulo urged us to practice “lecturing” in an oppositional voice
which is a dynamic, unveiling instrument. Paulo described this kind of “lecture”
as an “oral codification” which pictures in words a problematic condition or
situation. It is an oral variation of Paulo’s original pictorial “codifications” which
he used to prompt discussion in his original literacy classes among peasants
and workers.
Perhaps most immediate for young critical teachers is not acting alone or
in isolation. Paulo often said, “You can’t confront the lion alone.” From the first
day of teaching, we should find allies to work with and to learn from, seeking
to work with groups of colleagues, not becoming singled out as a lone dissident
too easily dismissed by the administration.
Paulo also insisted on the value of education inside ongoing social move-
ments outside formal schools and colleges in the political arenas of society,
where teachers had a lot offer contending organizations which in turn had a lot
to offer them. Paulo’s emphasis on social movements as sites of teaching and
learning is very important. I have always been involved in social movements
before and after I became a teacher. Paulo Freire, of course, was involved in
social movements before the terrible coup of 1964 which forced him out of
Brazil, and then again after he returned to Brazil in 1980.
I connect the politics of critical teaching with the politics of protest in
society by saying that “Classrooms cannot be managed from the outside and
cannot be defended from the inside.” By this, I mean that outside authorities
invade classrooms with required curricula, mandates tests, pre-set syllabi, and
standardized testing. These distant authorities micro-manage teaching and learn-
ing in the classroom so as to control the development of students and to limit
the professional autonomy of educators. Professional educators must be allowed
to design student-centered, locally-situated creative and critical learning pro-
grams in their classrooms. Control from outside authorities is anti-educational,
undemocratic, and bureaucratically suffocating. To win the power to control
the inside process of the classroom, teachers and students have no choice but
to protest together outside the classroom to stop the abusive invasion of their
work by state and corporate authorities.
Kits and packages are what we call here “teacher-proofing” the curriculum.
Neoliberals who want greater management control of professional educators at
lower cost, and education traditionalists who favor Core Knowledge based on
canonical books and themes, push such kits. The premier kit-maker of the last
30 years in the U.S. has been E.D. Hirsch who published a series of books on
what children in every grade must know, in addition to a children’s dictionary
of “cultural literacy” based on a list of 5,000 traditional items he published first
in 1987. Curriculum “kits” and “packages” are management tools to control the
costs, autonomy, and outcomes of schooling.
“Kits” arrive as a “solution” after a long period of propaganda about the
failures of public schools. For the last 4 decades in the U.S., a constant nega-
tive narrative has poured out of government, mass media, conservative pundits,
foundations, and corporate leaders, that “public education is a failure because
teachers don’t care, teacher unions protect bad teachers from being fired, and
parents are not allowed choice in picking what school their kids should attend.”
This neoliberal storytelling does not include growing poverty, stagnating family
wages, overwork and underpay, unaffordable housing, large class size, crumbling
infrastructure, or racist segregation as factors in the fate of public schools. This
official story of school failure puts the public sector on the defensive, preparing
the way for “kits” and “packages.”
But, the best way to ensure teacher competency at school is to invest
in small classes, intense tutoring services for students, parent involvement in
each school, and robust professional development. Each school must have a
professional development plan which assigns to teachers themselves the task of
observing, evaluating, and improving classroom practice of their peers. Parents
and students should be involved in this process as stakeholders for quality teach-
ing and learning. We already have a strong research literature on professional
development that works.
Ira Shor: I visited Paulo Freire in Brazil in 1986 and spoke to a gradu-
ate class at Sao Paulo University. He mentioned a debate underway then about
“pedagogy of contents” which was being posed against his “pedagogy of the
oppressed.” The opposition to Paulo then emphasized “contents” to elevate hard
subject matter in the school curriculum rather than student-centered critical
learning methods. A similar campaign was underway here in the 1980s, led by
the scholar named above, E. D. Hirsch, along with others like Mortimer Adler,
Diane Ravitch, and Chester Finn. That debate led to a ferocious “culture war”
about how to teach the history of our country. Liberal, feminist, multicultural,
and labor advocates on one side proposed non-traditional contents for a critical
narrative of national formation, while conservative, traditional, and corporate
advocates insisted on a mainstream narrative of the great events, great people,
and wonderful things accomplished. This curriculum war grew so intense that
by the early 1990s, subject matter or “the pedagogy of contents” was too toxic
for any education reform from Washington or state capitals. Instead, since 2002,
successive national reforms have emphasized two skill-based activities only-
reading and mathematics. The current Common Core attempt to unify curriculum
apparently tests only skills, not contents, in reading and math, but canonical or
traditional contents will be slipped in the back door, via the reading selections
used on the standardized tests.
A frontal advocacy of traditional subject matters is now avoided here
in favor of “skills.” However, there has been a long crisis in the liberal arts,
beginning 45 years ago when university liberal arts programs housed the most
dissident elements in that period of mass movements. Closing down the large
protest culture of that time involved restricting liberal arts, which made those
subject matters the target of budget cuts. The policy environment now remains
toxic to training teachers in humanities disciplines because those areas are most
open to critical thought and oppositional analysis. The corporate neoliberal
capture of higher education is hostile to critical thinking about power in school
and society. A neoliberal state is building a neoliberal university which trains
graduates in narrow occupations emphasizing technical expertise in a specific
professional employment. Narrowly-trained, compliant professionals who don’t
question authority are the employees of choice, including the employees of
schools, like teachers. Thus, the triumph of neoliberalism includes a triumph over
teacher-education to favor “banking” practices which funnel pre-set, approved
kits of knowledge to students. The task of critical educators then, is to oppose
this dehumanizing narrowness in forming professional educators. Spaciously
trained teachers should be graduated as educators who can develop civic-minded
students able to rescue and re-make their toxic planet and cruel societies.
morrow!” For the next two years I traveled wherever Paulo was in the North to
work on the book with him, and in 1986 we published what he called his first
“talking book,” known in English as A pedagogy for liberation, in Brasil as
Medo e ousadia: o cotidiano do professor, still in print 30 years later, translated
into Hebrew, Chinese, and Greek.
Paulo’s writings and conversations taught me how to understand policy,
history, foundations, and the relation of power to education and classroom
practice. Perhaps most of all, that education is politics, that all pedagogies are
political, all methods for teaching and learning form human subjects, all choices
about topics, readings, and discourse in the classroom construct people who
bring into being their world.
Paulo’s work is relevant for critical educators today. Education is more
political than ever; power relations are invading classrooms like never before.
Paulo insisted that all teaching practice must be situated in the actual condi-
tions where we work for the actual students we work with, so there is no single
model or standard model of critical teaching that should be copied everywhere.
Paulo urged reinventing his pedagogy for the realities of our times and places.
He said, “The best way to follow me is not to follow me.”
We need to expand critical pedagogy as a category including many kinds
of themes, approaches, subject matters, constitutencies, and locations in and
out of schools-feminist pedagogy, anti-racist teaching, social justice curricula,
themes of sexual preference and heterosexism, environmentalism, and the use
of digital tools for democratic activism.
Paulo opposed standardized curricula and bureaucratic testing; students had
to be cognitively active as researchers and co-developers of classroom inquiry;
education was responsible above all for humanization, to make us always more
fully human, by which Paulo understood being human as an orientation towards
compassion, cooperation, curiosity, freedom, tolerance, playfulness, humor,
love, and justice… to counter the dehumanizing effects of unequal domination
by the cruel elites now ruling all societies.
All in all, then, I would say that humanization and social justice, the un-
derlying themes of Paulo Freire’s work, remain as relevant today as always. A
humane world that is less cruel and more just was Paulo Freire’s lifelong dream.
Paulo dreamed of such a world but he worked for it too, his feet firmly planted in
the facts of history. There was for him “the power now in power” arrayed against
“the power not yet in power.” He knew which side he was on, and so do we.